Farm To Fork: Maple Tapping And Barbecue

Nothing says New England in this season more than maple syrup. And it turns out that even the most densely populated community in the region — Somerville — has a sugar shack of its own.

It comes from the folks at the community nonprofit Groundwork Somerville, which uses the maple-syrup process as the basis for a 2nd-grade curriculum in the Somerville public schools.

“This year the winter has been very strange, and we really had no idea if we were going to get much of a sap flow at all,” said Tai Dinnan, gardens coordinator at Groundwork Somerville. “We never got a deep freeze. In fact, it went above and below freezing almost every day for the whole winter.”

The crew tapped the trees two weeks earlier than usual and found the sap was indeed running, but at a lower sugar content than last year. But as Andy Husbands found, once boiled down into maple syrup, it was plenty sweet enough to form the foundation of his “wicked good” barbecue sauce.